Holiday 2017 Countdown: Is your Location Data Ready?

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For marketers everywhere, holiday season planning is in its final stages. With T-6 weeks until Black Friday and other major holiday sales, it’s time to focus on what matters and optimize for your everywhere customer.

In this blog series, we will take you through the must-do’s to make your brand stand out like never before this holiday season. First on the countdown check list: location data optimization.

Local-Social Queries

It’s no surprise to marketers that, if their audience is aligned, Snapchat is a must-use channel. This year alone, the platform has transgressed massively into becoming a focal point in terms of retail, restaurant and lifestyle marketing strategies.

This week, Snapchat upped the ante by releasing Context Cards. These cards are essentially swipable local listings sourced from Foursquare, Goop, Michelin and TripAdvisor to answer location-based queries they may have for people within their social network.

Outside of mere geo-targeted ads and filters, optimizing location data for Snapchat’s partnering channels to list on Context Cards may be a brand’s saving grace and competitive edge this holiday season. This is a significant opportunity to capitalize on for showcasing brand relevance, awareness of customer behavior and agility against competitors this busy holiday season.

Google Holiday OptimizationWith every holiday season comes a slew of new updates marketers must be aware of to stand out on search. For local in particular, becoming even more versed with the ongoing robust offering of Google My Business will help to get your locations in fighting shape to reach position one on local search. From hours, to accessibility to tags of sales and promotions, every ongoing update for each location drives relevance and context for users searching from across devices.

A strategy to surely consider when revisiting your current Google My Business approach is driving your location data further by providing customers the opportunity to chat with your nearby locations. If your marketing team intends to be tracking Social in this time, integrating and focusing on GMB messaging can, too, help ensure customers make it from search to store seamlessly.

Local Page Revamp

Another element of reinforcing online presence on search is ensuring that brand-owned properties also revamped with most updated and complete location information-- and this means local pages.

If you have local pages, now is the time to put the finishing touches on your holiday SEO by tagging and boosting the most relevant holiday-related information, photos, promotions and even social integrations. The more location-based information and context you can drive to these listings, the more accessible your brand owned properties will become to users.Whether you are a retailer looking to boost sales in-store or restaurant preparing for the next wave of holiday gathering traffic, location data optimization is a must to win this holiday season. To learn how your location data is currently performing and where your opportunities are, take Brandify’s multi-location brand scan.